Tag: Tottenham Hotspur

Good evening, and welcome to Sunday night at the football Palladium,our weekly chance to kick back, relax, empty our brains and watch some old football, because words can just be a little too much effort, sometimes. Tonight’s matches come from the tail end of the 1974/75 season, and feature a relegation four-pointer between Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea, a match between Everton and Sheffield United, a Second Division match between Norwich City and Nottingham Forest, as well as interviews with Steve Perryman and the Fulham – who’d just reached the FA Cup final – manager, Alec Stock. On top of...

You’ve done too much, much too young, The Specials famously sang on their seminal 1980 hit. That particular ditty was an anthem to a lost youth and the doom of adding another statistic to the population. However, it would also appear to be a maxim that could be applied to Portuguese wonderkid Andre Villas-Boas, who as we all know has now had the button pressed on his Daniel Levy supervised ejector seat. Some people argue it was activated far too soon, and some argue it wasn’t pressed soon enough. Villas-Boas is a difficult one to fathom out, on the one hand coming across like a coaching revolutionary, with his encyclopedia of techno-management speak, and on the other hand, coming across like a complete chancer, who has spent far too much time with his head buried in a dictionary and suffocated under a mountain of statistics. At the time of writing, he still hasn’t managed to shake off the “mini Mourinho” tag, the obvious legacy of working alongside the self-styled Special One. Again. this is a tricky one, because in some despatches, he adopts a clear “I’m my own man” posture, but at the same time, wears at least a percentage of his historical association with Mourinho like a gaudy bracelet of recognition. Sky Sports and other media of their ilk, often wheel out two things when talking about him: firstly,...

Imagine, for a moment, that I have built a time machine. It’s pretty limited – the technology is somewhat limited at the moment – in that it only has a range of four months, but it does at least allow me to go back to the start of the football season and make absurd-sounding predictions on these pages which turn out to come true. At the top of the list of predictions that I could conceivably make, a Nostradamus-like moment that would later see me burned at the stake as a confirmed heretic, would go something like this: “In December 2013, Andre Villa Boas departs as the manager of Tottenham Hotspur following a six-nil loss at Manchester City and a five-nil home defeat at the hands of Liverpool. In a surprise move, chairman Daniel Levy appoints former captain Tim Sherwood as his replacement on an eighteen month contract.” The removal of the previous incumbent probably couldn’t have come at a much worse time in terms of the managerial market. It’s not a time of year when the sort of manager that a club with the profile and – especially, considering the amount of money thrown around I’m the vicinity of the club during the summer and the lingering suspicion that the top end of the Premier League is as open as it has been for many years, which gives...

It has, dare we say it, been a tetchy two or three days for the managers of England’s football clubs. Even a breed of people that live their entire lives with a metaphorical axe suspended precariously over their heads will have offered an extra shudder at the events of last three days, which have resulted in the departure of three of their brethren from their positions, and such is the instability of the manager of any club these days that those that remain in work may well even find themselves unable to offer so much as a whispered, ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ tonight. If the form book is anything to go by, there, regardless of the grace of God, they are most likely to go in something like the short to medium term. To begin, then, at the top of the football food chain. Tottenham Hotspur may not have been the champions of England since John F Kennedy was the president of the United States of America, but modern football pays little attention to long-term trends. Spurs spent their Gareth Bale transfer window before they’d even sold that player, and the sheer volume of new recruits at White Hart Lane meant that Andre Villa Boas was always likely to face an uphill struggle in order to placate both the directors and supporters of the...

It was around the time that Man City rattled in their fifth goal last Sunday that a billion snarky armchair enthusiasts reached for their smartphones to riff on Erik Thorstvedt’s assertion that Spurs, in flogging Gareth Bale to Real Madrid’s marketing team, had ‘sold Elvis and bought The Beatles’. Hands a’tremblin’ with the excitement of injecting the internet with a hit of wit from a syringe marked ‘FUNNY’, and desperate to see Spurs’ title-chasing pretensions unceremoniously bludgeoned to death, the smirking know-it-alls went for it. The Beatles! As if! Villas Boas, it was clear, had not bought John, Paul, George and that other twat. Nope, he’d landed himself with…. oooh, let’s see now… Steps. ZING! Or… S Club 7! The Monkees! BOSH! That that, David Baddiel! Take that, humour! Personally, I went for Little Mix. It was either that or Gay Dad, but, obviously, I got it wrong. The Twitter mob decided ages go that, since the fat one in Little Mix who wasn’t fat anyway isn’t fat any more even though she wasn’t fat in the first place, Little Mix are the total opposite of Spurs and awesomeballs after all. Gah! After the laughter had subsided to a rolling boil, the world awoke to news that, despite having been entrusted with job of rebuilding Spurs in the post-Bale era, Villas-Boas was, incredibly, TEETERING on the BRINK of the...